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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

It's crude, but prevailing ageism makes a big opportunity for non-moronic employers. Basically, there's a giant talent pool right there for you to hire from, no matter your location, as long as you don't insist people are 22 and willing to sell all waking hours to your business.

Increasing the average age of your employees is a much smaller change to make to your company than, for example, hiring remote people (assuming you aren't already doing that). Even if you're currently the all-work-no-life 80-hours-a-week always-crunch-time kind of company, if you really have trouble finding the right talent, there's an option right there for you. It requires more sane working hours, yes, but maybe that's not a horribly bad idea anyway.

People not even considering this are doing themselves a disservice.

Anecdotally, I have found the argument that not-super-young people are somehow less smart or less eager to be entirely false.

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You are entirely right that there is an overlooked advantage here iff the kind of older people who are willing to work for you are at least as good as the kind of young people you can hire.

Intuitively the longer a person has been on the job market the higher the chance that person has either developed deep expertise in some subject or gotten a strong network. Most people who have either shouldn't have any problem getting employed (in the tech industry anyway) and so the kind you can hire are probably less likely to be as good as your younger employees. Note that this doesn't disagree with your anecdote, you just can't hire those people.

In addition, and this depends on how old they are, you might not want to make your first hire a person who is likely to have children soon. If suddenly half your workforce is on maternity/paternity leave that might sink your business (yeah discrimination based on this is illegal, doesn't mean it isn't a risk anyway).

If you don't want "a person who is likely to have children soon", the best person to hire is someone who's 40+. Anyone younger is still in their prime making-babies years.

> In addition, and this depends on how old they are, you might not want to make your first hire a person who is likely to have children soon. If suddenly half your workforce is on maternity/paternity leave that might sink your business (yeah discrimination based on this is illegal, doesn't mean it isn't a risk anyway).

If your company would scuttled by some portion of your employees taking paternity/maternity leave, it sounds like your company has organizational problems and you should be looking at why your business will fail rather than worrying about employees taking some time off.

If you are twenty people yes. If you are a startup with one employee, you have fewer options.

I still see this as a sign of an organizational problem for your startup. Naturally you'll have few(er) people and resources as a startup, but if your business plan requires that you constantly have output or be available to make changes, it sounds like you need to have more than 1 employee anyway and take that as a cost of how you operate. Alternatively, as a primary business owner you could take on that responsibility yourself since you reap the greatest rewards of the company success.

Also older people have much better people skills. The young, myself included, need to learn tact.

"if you really have trouble finding the right talent"

I was under the impression that kids with all sorts of skills were lining up ready to be exploited if it meant they can make video games.

Hiring some one who is 50 sort of a problem. They likely know what a salary is supposed to be. 20 somethings work for pennies in the game industry.

I wonder if increasing the average age of your employees could cause younger candidates to be less eager to join.

only if the younger employers are ageist take your argument and apply it to women, African American or Latino?

Not the younger folks I'd want on my team. Note, I said "older", not "boring".

Probably not as much as the other way around.

Only if it's at an extreme. I have heard of interns saying they didn't want to work at company X because every interviewer was over the age of 30.

I've also heard people complaining about not seeing a single woman or any person of color.

I strongly advocate representing diversity in the interview loop: Include a recent college hire, a senior dev, an ethnic person, and a woman. Or maybe just have all interviewers be brogrammer--each company can shape their own talent pool demographics.

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